Like a lot of services, Amplicate operates a “fermium” model. A quick search, which will give you a “hate” vs. “love” snapshot for a brand, is free. Pay $19 and you get a year’s worth of data. And for $199 you can download various industry reports.

Along with companies like Radian6 and Lithium, the Canadian research firm Sysomos is one of the giants in professional sentiment analysis. Sysomos originated from the University of Toronto research and some of that is still live on Blogscope.

We’ve had periodic problems connecting to the site, but when it’s live, the site is good for a free service. The charts it produces aren’t pretty, but they are useful.

This should be standard for anyone who works in social media. Free to access for any page admin, Facebook Insights provides an in-depth picture of fans’ interactions with your page.

It enables you to post content at the most optimum time and identify the content your fans engage with most. It also gives a pretty accurate demographic breakdown. Knowing where your fans come from and what they do on your page when they get there allows you to tailor your strategy more effectively.

Follower Wonk makes sense of a person’s Twitter feed. It is useful in giving the equivalent of the Facebook “friends of friends” metric. You can dissect a Twitter feed to see what type of users they reach in terms of followers and influence.

You start with 150 credits, with every search costing 30 to 40 credits (the idea being that after that you pay).

If a blog runs its RSS feeds through the Google-owned Feedburner—which many do—you can then run them through Feed Compare to look at subscriber numbers, which is arguably a more useful metric than visitors as this measures engaged users who subscribe to a blog.

As with many of these services, How Sociable wants you to subscribe (starting at $19 a month). But a free search will give you a range of influence metrics across different social networks—useful if you track over time, or are doing a quick competitive search.

These are the three main sentiment-scoring systems. Klout is trying to establish itself as the industry standard, while Kred is the newest entrant and one that shows a lot of promise.

Services like Klout do have flaws—which I’ve explored more—but Klout and Peerindex are useful for the ability to create lists that can be public or private. Essentially you can set up a league table of brands across a certain industry sector and track their scores over time.

With Instagram becoming a top-tier social network, there will be a greater need to analyze the site’s activity. Statigram, a free service with a number of different elements, allows you to view Instagram images via your browser, and set up a custom URL to direct people to (for example, http://statigr.am/bmibaby).

You can manage your followers and collect useful data, including information about the type of engagement your posts receive, your most committed followers, and the times of day to post.

When’s the best time to tweet to hit the optimum number of followers? Timely gives you the answer. A more sophisticated service that also looks at Facebook and provides data on influencers is Crowd Booster, which comes in at $20 a month for 10 accounts.

As the name says, Tweetreach will tell you the number of people who, in theory, saw your tweet. It also provides the most influential Twitter members for a given term. The first 50 results are free, making it useful to get a real-time snapshot of activity. If you want a more in-depth report, that will cost you $20.

Visual.ly is a kind of do-it-yourself infographics service. In Visual.ly labs, there is a tool to compare your Twitter profile against someone else’s, but this can just as easily be used for brands.

Finally, it important to remember that consistency and tracking is important—you will only get the best out of them if you use them regularly. For example, Klout, gives you the ability to benchmark yourself against your peers and track progress on a weekly basis to see if you are improving.